Chapter Text
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Sans was angry.
No.
In no universe, or timeline, or dissolution of reality would “anger” begin to describe the sensation that burned relentlessly through marrow and collagen like an unscratchable itch. Chipped fingers clenched at coarse furrowed bone, trails carved into his ribs and skull and sternum. They would heal, with time, but he would not.
Fury. Death by a thousand minuscule cuts that only just scratch the surface. Insects buzzing, inescapable, unavoidable. Filling his skull with noise until he just wanted to hurt something, kill something. Someone. Himself... Not enough.
Frustration. A pot of pasta simmering on a stove in an abandoned house. Left to degrade its contents into starches and molecules that can only float in an all consuming mire. Overcooked. Formless. He dumped his dreams into the sieve and the rest of him followed, leaving nothing but trails of slime and foam and biting hunger. Not even close.
Betrayal. Fractures traveling like lighting from impact, invisible in essence but all the more tangible. Within them he could feel the ghasts of broken trust and failed friendship and worthless worthless love, congealed and darkened, wrenching him apart millimeter by millimeter to ruin. Columns felled at the base inside the hall of his self judgement, weakening the foundation of his Soul until it toppled, too. Close, but not quite.
Crippling on their own, each fought for dominance within his broken spirit and compounded. No one word could carry the weight he buckled under. He wasn’t sure one existed.
Their King, Asgore, was dead; his dust as soft and giving underfoot in the trampled remains of his garden as the old fool had been during life. The same garden that Sans would join him in for a cup of warm tea, which he hated, but drank for the sake of company and conversation and overly long breaks. Drops of red flecked the yellow crumpled blooms his brother had watered diligently from seed with cheerful abandon; eager to help in the act of creation within the stagnant castle, in which despair and melancholy gathered like cobwebs among the coffers.
For all intent and purposes Frisk was dead too. Not literally, but still in a way that left a messily gouged absence within him. They had taken the King's soul and absconded through the barrier without a second glance behind them, and the hopes of monsterkind had sunken into the long shadow they cast in their wake. The six souls. Their freedom. Their future. All thrown aside carelessly like inventory for an adventure cut short.
It had taken most of his magic to burst his way through the blocked throne room doors, carving smoldering swaths of destruction into the thick latticework of thorned vines that cemented them shut. By the time he had succeeded, the sounds of conflict had died out, and when he opened the doors with trembling fingers and dripping bones, he was met with regicide and the foreboding hum of the barrier still standing strong in the next room.
He wasn’t stupid. To pass the barrier without dismantling it, you needed a human soul, and a monster soul. Sans may not have been the best at history, and slept through most of english, but he excelled at math.
The kid - his kid… whom he’d joked with and ate with and protected and let play with his brother, his precious baby bro -
‘* god, it could have been papyrus…’
- was a murderer. A Soul consumer. A demon. Asgore had trusted Sans’s judgment of character so much that he’d given him this royal position, visitors standing trial in the great decorated hallway as the lights in his sockets read every twitch, every glance, every intake of breath and flare of magic to ensure that only those with pure intent might pass. Then, how had he judged them so wrongly?
He’d thought they were friends, even.
Frisk wasn’t dead, but they were dead to him. Fingers like pale roots dug into the grass, into the earth, as he supplicated to his fallen king, to his missing queen - to any being past present or future that would answer his wailing lament - in front of the pair of now empty thrones. Still inconsolable, still blaming, still hating, he retched, viscous glowing magic puddling and absorbing into the torn dirt. If he pretended hard enough, it was easier to cope. The thought that that damn kid was out there living, actually living, while they were trapped under foot like a reflection in a shallow pool was too much for him to bear. Like their own lives were simply a supporting act for the main event.
The main event, of course, was helping the human through the underground and orchestrating their own downfall. Every monster had a part to play and like fools, like pawns , they had put on one hell of a show. What a joke. The humans had a phrase for this, he remembered, written in waterlogged scripts tossed into the gutter they’d gussied up into their main stage. A “Tragic Comedy”. Yeah. That pretty much summed it up.
They had been so close. So close! Sans was sure that it would have been only a matter of years, no more than a decade, until he’d feel the sun warm his bones. He would have taken huge breaths into nonexistent lungs of the fresh air that swept freely between the clouds, unimpeded by stone; light, refreshing, without the mildew and sediment that hung heavy in the cavern “skies”. He’d been saving his gold for years, a little nest egg to buy Papyrus anything and everything he’d been unable to provide for him growing up Underground. The bright red car he’d begged for. A new sewing machine. Culinary school. He didn’t need much himself. Maybe a house, modest, comfortable - somewhere he could see the stars.
All gone.
He let himself grieve, taking over the position of gardener- just temporarily- for broken petals and crushed stems, the magic he poured into them unsustaining and wasteful. Sans couldn’t remember the last time he had cried, maybe when his father died, maybe not even then, he couldn’t quite recall - but he cried for this. He and his brother would die under the same mountain they’d been born under. Hope wasn’t something that came easily to him, a resource that he was destitute, but he’d let himself hope for Papyrus’s sake. The Underground was too small for the brilliant star of a Soul contained in his brother. It was cruel. It was unfair.
It made him mourn. It made him ache. It made him angry and furious and frustrated and betrayed and… and…
He sighed.
'* and… what?'
Like a heavy blanket, he felt numbness overtake him. What use was burning up without matter to consume, kindling to devour? It didn’t matter. The kid was gone. Asgore was gone. The Souls were gone. His future was gone. His hope was -
He wished he could disappear, too.
A flickering candle, his soul flared weakly once, twice, the dim light casting the cage of his ribs in stark relief on the stone walls. The pulses came slower, weaker, as the river-like flow of emptiness and despair and a convoluted sense of peace pulled at him. Deeper, deeper, and deeper still.
Like the parchment white shine of a lighthouse upon an illustrated and tumultuous ocean, reproduced within in a thick tome he’d reverently pulled from the dump, a light interrupted his darkness - his sleep. His brother’s voice cut through the haze in a memory, asking for a bedtime story that if he continued down this path, he could never deliver.
With more effort than he’d put into anything in his entire life, Sans opened his eyes and stood. And with even more effort than that, he packed those cutting, scorching, destructive feelings into a snowball, a star core, an atom, smaller and tighter still, and buried that spark so far into his soul that it sustained him like a battery.
He couldn’t fall to pieces over this, though stars he wanted to.. Papyrus needed him.
One last shaky breath was all Sans allowed himself in reflection before steeling himself and slipping back into his well practiced mask. Tight sides, zygomatic arches pinching the corners of his sockets, lights tight and dim. It would read “stressed, scared, but confused,” he surmised. The perfect expression of a generally passive, well regulated, chill monster who’d just seen something horrific. Not that he needed to fake those particular emotions, but it was much easier to stay in control of a conversation with neutrality. He let some of the numbness back in, but not too much. Enough to function, for now at least.
With slumped shoulders and hands shoved deep into the pockets of his dusty blue jacket, Sans went to inform Undyne, the Captain of the Royal Guard, what had just happened to their King.
.
..
…
As hard as it was to stand on shattered hope, the civilization of monsters was practiced. Professionals. A grim reminder of eons past, this new generation supported each other through this new loss and powered on. They had nothing to live for now except each other and the realization that they themselves, and their children, and most likely their children's children would die under miles of earth and stone with a mockery of the night sky done up in more rocks still. Naught more than trace minerals and magic themselves, the monsters did what they had to do. They took the pressure of their circumstances and the heat of their suffering into themselves and became metamorphic.
Strong. Unbreakable. Brilliant.
Undyne was a diamond. After Frisk's departure, the underground had fallen into chaos. Hope, necessary for sustaining life for all varieties of magical creatures, was in short supply. It took half a millennia for them to gain the six souls they had, and that era long wait had whittled down their numbers from tens of thousands to merely a couple. They needed someone to set an example and show them that they could and would survive, or at least persist. They needed this like humans needed air, and water, and food. So the former captain of the royal guard wiped away her tears, grieved the man she viewed not as a king, but as family - as a father - and shackled herself into the center stone setting of her new duty as Queen.
Nothing much changed. Nothing needed to. Her position was more figurehead than mastermind. But after only two weeks, she took her place upon the throne, imposingly large and golden with lovingly cared for velvet cushions that felt strange against her scales. It made her feel vulnerable with their proportion and give, made for a monster twice her size and three times her width. Feeling smaller than she ever had, but overflowing with love for her people and determination for their continued survival, Undyne gave one order.
No longer would they hinge their futures on chance, on fate, on humans. The vile creatures had betrayed their trust not once, banishing them deep into the underground to fade into mythos and legend, but twice now. When someone shows you what they are - believe them. And humans were violent, untrustworthy things. Any human that ended up in their domain henceforth, was to be brought directly to Undyne. And unlike the late Asgore, she did not share his penchant for Mercy.
.
..
…
To an unpracticed and optimistic eye, it’s fairly easy to mistake a diamond for a simple hunk of silicate. Still formed with pressure and heat but creating something brittle. Fragile. Easily broken.
Sans was glass masquerading as a diamond for Papyrus.
Like a delicately shaped blown sculpture, he almost shattered when two months later, the resets started once more.